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In the Margins

The actes d’individualite have turned out to be gifts that keep on giving. Once I was able to identify Augustin as my direct Cadignan ancestor (see here and here) I went back to the actes and found his entry, number 559. Without even being able to read the French handrwriting there were two things that caught my attention. First, there was a long note written in the margin that all the zooming in the world could not help me to begin to decipher. Second, there were actually two actes d’individualite for Augustin. They were both numbered 559 and they both had a long note written in the margin. At first I thought the good people at the Patrimoines Martiniquais must have saved and posted two copies of the same scanned image in their online archives – a simple mistake. But after toggling between the two a couple of times it became obvious that they were written by two different hands and were placed in different areas of the page in relation to the margins, upper and lower corners, and so on. These entries were clearly scanned from two different pages. You can see the undeniable differences in the images below.

Though I couldn’t read the margin notes I could tell that the main text of the record seemed to be the same in both versions. If the notes in the margin were also the same, I realized a possible explanation could be that one of these records was hand-copied from the other as a backup.

Since I had a hard time making out the writing in the margins I again enlisted the help of my French friend Sylvine. After taking a look at both versions she agreed with my theory. She said that the text of each record was the same, including the margin notes. Those mysterious margin notes read as follows:

By this act on January 30, 1901, written on the same day, at Francois’ City Hall, under the number 4 (?), Mr. Cadignan Augustin, called Auguste, whose birth was recorded in the record on the side, married Miss Desir-Honorine Marie-Herminie. ~ Officer.

These Martinique record keepers are kind of awesome, aren’t they? Not only did they keep two copies of these records, but they added notes in the margins recording another important life event. So my great-great-great-grandfather Augustin married a woman by the name of Marie-Herminie Desir-Honorine. BUT this was well after my great-great grandfather Joseph and my great-grandmother Adele were born, in 1864 and 1893, respectively. This woman is definitely not an ancestor of mine, but it tells us that my third great-grandfather Augustin re-married much later in life, in his early to mid-sixties.